Ever wanted to compare sensor crop for your mixed camera shoot? Phil Holland has added formatCompare to his online toolset on PHFX.com
Over the past couple of months, we’ve taken a look at a few of Phil’s online tools aimed primarily at RED cinematographers.
REDCamAssist: RED Simplified with PHFX New REDCamAssist
LensData: PHFX LensData for RED Users – Matches Lens Types with Sensors
formatCompare – Sensor Crop Calculator
The latest addition to Phil’s growing set of tools is formatCompare, an easy-to-use sensor crop calculator which allows you to select two cameras with their corresponding resolutions, and generate a comparison of active sensor area, and corresponding data. The list of cameras is relatively limited at the moment, but should grow as more data is added.
It’s not quite the same as Abelcine’s popular FOV calculator, which also provides a visual estimation of field of view for the focal length of a given lens, but Abelcine’s list of cameras and formats is also far from complete. I can see it being useful to bookmark both of these tools.
Head over to http://phfx.com/tools/formatCompare/ to check it out.

By now, almost everyone might have heard of the Metabones Speed Booster, a brilliant adapter that allows you to achieve a full frame look on a cropped sensor (APS-C or Super35) camera – particularly Canon EF lenses on Sony E or Panasonic GH2/3/4 cameras. The Speed Booster uses high quality glass that “compresses” the full frame image from the full frame EF lens to the smaller imaging area of the sensor, thereby even gaining over one full stop of light. In essence, it makes your lenses effectively “wider and faster”, which is nothing short of amazing. My Metabones Speed Booster Ultra “lives” on my Sony FS7, on which I can use my ZEISS Compact Primes or any Canon EF L lenses using the Speed Booster Ultra and the aforementioned benefits.
Following a similar concept in a higher-end package, the newly announced IB/E S35 x FF Expander does something similar to the Metabones Speed Booster, but exactly the other way around: It’s meant for S35 lenses that are used on larger sensor cameras, like for example the RED Epic/Weapon.
It’s a fact that many higher-end professional film lenses are S35 only, because they were created to expose the S35 negative of film stock, which is about half as big as the “full frame” 35mm from photo stills cameras (first used for filmmaking with the Canon 5D Mark II, most popular nowadays with the Sony A7 series).
However now there are also higher-end cameras like the RED Epic on the market, which offer a sensor that is larger than S35. While the RED offers a crop mode at lower resolutions, in order to utilize the full resolution of the sensor you had to use “full frame” lenses so far.
It makes a lot of sense to introduce that concept to the higher-end market, because this adapter further increases the compatibility of lenses to cameras.
IB/E Optics created the S35 x FF Expander to facilitate common PL mount S35 lenses, and as we can hear in the video, the “camera side” offers an interchangeable mount which effectively also makes this a PL adapter for all your cameras (however please be aware that there will be flange distance related issues on some camera and lens combinations, meaning you cannot always achieve back focus with all lenses on all cameras – this needs to be tested before you set your eyes on a particular combination for a project!).
More details on the Band Pro website. It will be available in December and sell for $6900.

John Terendy from Image Control hooked me up with the killer FOV chart from Abel Cine Tech. The FOV calculator lets you plug in lenses and it will show you what it will look like depending on the size of the sensor. The chart has all lenses and sensors ranging from Super 35mm Motion Picture to ¼ inch HD, all HDSLR’s included. This is a really useful tool to help explain FOV and crop sensors.
Click here to check it out.